For What Sin Was Saul Punished?

Patrick Allitt’s review in the magazine of Philip Jenkins’s book, Laying Down the Sword, reminded me of a bit of interpretive ju-jitsu that a Haredi (ultra-Orthodox Jewish) friend of mine once taught me.

In 1 Samuel 15, God, through the prophet Samuel, sends Saul on a mission to exterminate the Amalekites. The instructions are explicit: don’t just kill the men, but the women and children also, and even the cattle – spare nothing and no one. Saul, first, sensitively warns the Kenites, a more friendly tribe, to dissociate themselves from the Amalekites, lest they be destroyed along with them. And he then makes vigorous war on the Amalekites, emerging victorious, with considerable booty including the Amalekite king as a captive and the choicest cattle.

For his disobedience, Samuel informs Saul, God has removed him from the kingship. Saul explains that the cattle he took were intended for sacrifice, but Samuel is not appeased: God doesn’t want sacrifices, He wants obedience. And Samuel, to demonstrate what Saul should have done, hacks Agag to pieces before his eyes.

So: for what sin was Saul punished with the loss of the kingdom?

Apparently, he was punished for failing to kill Agag and for failing to destroy all the Amalekite property. But my friend said: no. He was punished for murdering all those innocent women and children.

In general, while war is recognized as potentially a moral act (if it’s a matter of self-defense, for example), wanton slaughter of innocents is murder, and prohibited. In this instance, God has explicitly commanded such a slaughter, so it is not only permitted but mandatory. But it is only because this particular act is mandated by God directly that one could commit it without being condemned for murder. Since he failed to follow God’s command perfectly, Saul cannot expiate his guilt for the murders he committed by saying that he was only following God’s command. And he has no other defense. Therefore he is guilty of murder – and for this, he lost the kingdom.

To someone with the appropriate humility about his or her own moral perfection, such an approach to this difficult text is quite appealing. If you know you are a sinner, and imperfect, you have no business going around murdering people in God’s name; you cannot be sure that you are following His way perfectly, and if you aren’t, you’ll be condemned for murder. Better to leave such work to God Himself.

Unfortunately, the sorts of people who are likely to go around committing murder – or, more likely, suborning others into committing murder – in God’s name are precisely the sorts of people who are likely to delude themselves into thinking that they are without or beyond sin, and are indeed perfectly obedient vessels for God’s righteous commands.

An alternative: the destruction of everything was part of ancient holy warfare, a common practice in the ancient world. But unlike most nations, where it became a pretext for creating a “military industrail complex” because the booty became a way of subsidizing standing armies, and hence expanding empire. Holy war was a limited, one off engagement,attempting to limit the use for violence.

Compared to ancient society, where religion and empire where closely tied, this was completely different.

Stories are created to explain difficult facts. Saul was handsome and commanding, but not too bright. David, younger and brighter, succeeded him, but he was from a different tribe. How to justify the removal of a king? He broke God’s command. Saul also visited witches–more bad karma. This story is not a lesson in how bad God is or what was Saul’s sin. If you like, you can ask what was pharaoh’s sin since he was willing to let the Israelites go until God hardened his heart. Something happened and the narrators explained it in ways that they expected would teach their listeners about the power of God and his determination that what had occurred (change of the king from one tribe to another; release of captives) was all part of God’s plan.

If you accept the Biblical doctrine of original sin, the dilemma of massacring “innocent women and children” does not arise – there is no such thing. To those who address me with the problem of theodicy – why does God allow the death, the murder, of little children?, I reply that they are asking the wrong question. The marvel is that God allows any of us to remain alive one more second. As the Allitt review of the Jenkins book brings out, God once wiped out the entire human race, saving only Noah and his family, and God didn’t spare Noah because he was more virtuous than his contemporaries. God saved him because of Noah’s faith.

Saul was not the only leader of God’s people that was challenged to obey an horrific divine command. But if Saul quailed at the prospect of killing the Amalekite children (and his reluctance may, as in the case of the part of God’s command that all the Amalakite livestock also be destroyed, have been grounded in his revulsion at the thought of depriving himself of the fruits of his conquest), what would his response have been had a greater sacrifice been required of him, say, the life of his only son? The greatest recorded test of a man’s obedience to God was, of course, that posed to Abraham, the command that he sacrifice Isaac, his only legitimate son, the child of God’s promise, a promise fulfilled after a lifetime of patient waiting only by a miraculous birth. Abraham proved his faithfulness to God in his willingness to follow a command that not only broke his heart, but appeared to contradict all that God had promised him, indeed, all that Abraham thought he knew about God. That Saul could not sacrifice the children, even the possessions of the Amalekites, means that he was nowhere close to proving the faith in God that Abraham had.

Well, after all that, the question the Bible begs of all those who are its proponents, advocates and teachers, is, “If this is the nature of the God of the Bible, how can you ask us to believe in, to serve, to worship such a God, a God who would order a man to take the lives of innocent children, a God who would order a man to take the life of his own innocent child?

The answer, as we know, is that we believe in, we serve, we worship such a God, a God who would ask us for such a sacrifice of that which we treasure most, of all we think we know to be decent and right, only because God Himself made that very sacrifice for us.

“Innocent” children, from infancy to old age, have died from the beginning of the human race, they die today, and they will continue to die until the Kingdom comes. And all this according to the inscrutable wisdom of God’s providential will for us. All because it was through that one, most horrifying, sacrifice of His Son, that every innocent, every not so innocent, child from the beginning of time has been given victory over death. The death of all those Amalekite women and children, of all the world’s women and children, has lost its sting, has lost its victory.

“To those who address me with the problem of theodicy – why does God allow the death, the murder, of little children?, I reply that they are asking the wrong question. The marvel is that God allows any of us to remain alive one more second.”

For me, your entire comment, which is well reasoned according to your inputs, is a great example of how reasonable people can come to monstrous conclusions if their inputs are bad. This is where, for me, doubt as a tool is indispensable. You always have to doubt your inputs. We are tiny, tiny, tiny little creatures and the possibility that we are getting something wrong is inversely huge.

Scriptural analysis requires an understanding of message and not a detour into unpalatable facts or versions of facts. One of the messages of Saul’s losing his kingship for his purported failure to obey God’s command was that the author of this narrative was showing that God’s favor rests upon whom he pleases, often the younger son. Traditionally, Saul’s successor to the kingship should have been his own son Jonathan. Yet God bestowed the kingship on David with the famous prophesy of 2 Samuel 7:17 that from David’s line would come the messiah. The message that God favors the younger over the older is throughout the Hebrew scriptures. God favored Abel over Cain, Jacob over Esau, Joseph over his elder brothers, David (the youngest of his brothers) over Saul, and most importantly Solomon over his older brothers after the death of King David. God blessed Jacob even though he lied to his father Isaac in pretending he was Esau in order to get the blessing that Isacc intended for older brother Esau. Primogeniture died a slow death as anyone familiar with English stories of the 19th century. How difficult it was, then, for an upstart son to take over the kingship when he had older brothers who regarded kingship as theirs by right. There is a lot going on in these stories that has nothing to do with the nature of God, but with an important message to the audience to explain what custom would compel them to reject. God speaks through scripture but not through just one voice because there are many authors and many emphases.

The marvel is that any thinking person believes any of this nonsense, let alone attempts to interpret it to justify their own worldview.

Your explanation is further nonsense, because at the time this allegedly happened, there was no redemption, and God’s alleged sacrifice had not yet occurred. So this is a God who orders that which we know intuitively is abhorrent out of sheer avarice or caprice. And he does so solely to test people? What a horrid prospect!

To the extent your ridiculous explanation makes any sense at all, it falters on its own reasoning. The ultimate test, as you put it, posed to Abraham was not to kill his son, but to be willing to kill his son. This is not the test posed to Saul. Rather he was ordered to kill them all, and he did, save for the ones he didn’t. No divine hand of mercy.

So we are left with a bloodthirsty tale, written by an ancient and bloodthirsty people, to justify their own conquering. To attempt to glean value from this today is pure alchemy, and to less noble aims.

To those who address me with the problem of theodicy – why does God allow the death, the murder, of little children?, I reply that they are asking the wrong question. The marvel is that God allows any of us to remain alive one more second.

A god such as you believe in is indistinguishable from a devil. He may or may not exist, but if he does exist, by any conceivable human standard he is profoundly evil. You may reply that he is good by his own standards, if not ours, but how does that change things? Evil people are often good by their own standards; why should evil gods be any different?

Who are all you people reading TAC? Somehow the belief in traditionalism, including traditional religion, got left out in the definition of “conservative” by the people slamming God and the Old Testament here.

As for the interpretation, it may be correct. The purpose of the “total warfare” was to eradicate any remnant of the pagan culture that carried idolatry – the women and children would have remembered the old ways and carried that over to Israel. Even the animals were tinged with the spiritual marks of paganism. When Saul disobeyed God by retaining some remnant of pagan Amalek, yet still killed the women and the children, he did render their death for naught.

Here is a more thorough study of whether the war against Amalek was “genocide”:

WHen, C Herman, are you allowed to abandon tradition that no longer makes sense? The definition of conservative has to include a mechanism for abandoning disfunctional tradition or else the whole concept of conservativism collapses into a black hole of absurdity.

“The greatest recorded test of a man’s obedience to God was, of course, that posed to Abraham, the command that he sacrifice Isaac, his only legitimate son, the child of God’s promise, a promise fulfilled after a lifetime of patient waiting only by a miraculous birth. Abraham proved his faithfulness to God in his willingness to follow a command that not only broke his heart, but appeared to contradict all that God had promised him, indeed, all that Abraham thought he knew about God.”

This, THIS, is the original sin that stains all of the Abrahamic religions. A man would kill his son because of voices in his head.

cw – the possibility of getting something terribly wrong is huge – for that reason it is imperative we trust in God – through the study of the Scriptures and prayer – in all we do.

Jack – you forget that God had pronounced his Decrees of Salvation before God created the World. God left nothing to chance when her ordered the slaughter of the Amalekites or when he commanded Abraham to take the life of Isaac. Their place in God’s eternal Kingdom was assured to those slaughtered children before they were born. Everything that occurs in the Old Testament points to the coming of Christ in the New. That is why we know the Gospel is true.

jb – you aren’t the first to mistake the works of Christ for those of the Devil. As Jesus pointed out at that time, the devil does not wage war against himself. Whoever it was that sacrificed His Son to save all those Amalekite (and Jewish, and Gentile, and American) children from the flames of hell, it wasn’t the devil.

A wise man once said that the Christian Gospel is an affront to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks. It appears that is as true today as when it was first written.

C Herman writes:
“Who are all you people reading TAC? Somehow the belief in traditionalism, including traditional religion, got left out in the definition of “conservative” by the people slamming God and the Old Testament here.”

Lots of praise for Abraham on display here, but nothing of Jacob, who wrestled with God all night as an adversary and still found His favor. Don’t fret so much. Remember that the people who still carry his sobriquet from that night are best represented through their ongoing struggles than by their boring submissions.

Re: An alternative: the destruction of everything was part of ancient holy warfare, a common practice in the ancient world.

Examples? Because it seems that most ancient wars involved grabbing land and treasures and maybe enslaving conquered people, not outright genocide. Even history’s more notorious cases, the Roman destruction of Carthage, or the Athenian attack on Melos, ended with the women and children at least being enslaved, not slaughtered wholesale.

I understand what you are saying. The conservative (and the faithful religionist) trusts in higher authority–traditions, institutions–that have in the past “worked” or appeared to work or worked for them or their cohort. This is a wise choice becasue you have evidence that a process or policy is fruitful or an institution has been effective. But the world inevitably changes. The environment changes, politics and economic systems change, culture changes in response. To be a useful philosophy, conservatism has to have a mechanism to deal with inevitable change.

If you believe in God the creator then all this change and our requirement to deal with it is his creation. So it seems to me the job of the religious conservative is to find ways to bring the essence of your religion’s teachings with you on this journey of inevitable change. This probably means you have to let some of the trapping go, render some stuff unto Caesar, etc….

Hugo Longbone: “When did TAC become so infested with rabid secularists?”
You don’t have to be a crusader to be a conservative. Remember that these United States were founded as a non-religious State (compare with another State founded around the same time, Brazil,that had catholicism as official religion).
A fundamentalist America would be as revolutionary as a socialist America, and as such, unacceptable for true conservatives. It was founded as land where heretics, apostates and followers of non abrahamic religions would have freedom of worship, not as the Christian Republic of America.

Actually, God withdrew his favor before Agag entered the picture 1 Sam 13-14. To me it appears God simply changed his mind and wanted David instead of Saul. In 1 Sam 13:8 Saul testifies that he waited the allotted 7 days. It seems fishy that Samuel shows up just when the sacrifice was completed.

I suppose it’s silly to comment on a post that is nearing its third birthday, so I apologize.

This reminds me of the tests that qualify a person as a conscientious objector. If you cannot show that you are willing to renounce violence in all situations, even when an act of violence is the only way to spare one’s dearest loved ones from extreme harm, then you don’t qualify. If you are willing to swat the gun from the hand of the man who is about to shoot your newborn, but not willing to set off a nuclear bomb in the city of your commanding officer’s choosing, it isn’t violence you have renounced, but your loyalty to the authority which that officer represents.

Your friend’s interpretation of Saul’s failing shows the same reasoning. Just as a willingness to use violence under some circumstances strips a person of pacifism as a defense for refusing to fight under other circumstances, so Saul’s decision to stop killing the Amalekites after they had ceased to pose a threat to his power but before he had fulfilled the Lord’s command stripped him of the ability to appeal to that command as justification for the atrocities he committed in safeguarding and promoting his own interests.

Untimely as this comment is in respect the date of the original post, I think your friend’s analysis is most timely. I’m thinking of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. If we tell Muslims that they ought to respond peaceably to insults directed at their religion and at them personally because freedom of thought is necessarily freedom for the thought we hate, we can be taken seriously if and only if we ourselves scrupulously safeguard the rights of those who express the thoughts that we ourselves most hate. If we fall short of that, what we in fact stand for is not the freedom of thought, but the freedom to taunt those outside our own charmed circle. Which is not, on the face of it, a remarkably precious freedom.

Since Abraham was willing to sacrifice is own son and went about the task of doing so only to be stopped before the atrocity occurred, can we not wonder if God would have acted to stop the atrocity of slaying the innocents if Saul had been willing and acted toward completing that command? Since he chose to disobey God we can only know what occurred from the disobedience and we can only ponder what might have happened had he set about in complete obedience.Similarly we can wonder what would have happened had Adam refused the fruit from Eve and instead acted as a mediator to reconcile her to God. We can wonder what might have happened had Abraham refused relations with Hagar, Sarah’s handmaid. Trying to evaluate the consequences of the disobedience by taking for granted that God would have allowed the complete slaughter of all the people, women and children and all the livestock does not seem a fair thing to do since we have seen that he can change his mind and can provide substitute actions when someone does act in obedience.